Trying to dig deeper, under and beyond the obvious meaning and to make the girl the center of the photo, I suddenly understood Barthe’s concept around significance.
“What is significance? It is meaning, insofar as it is sensually produced”.
There’s something violent in this photo, a punctum, a word pulling images out of our minds and before our eyes. An image that is not the girl, but in the girl, and takes us out of the gallery, out of the exhibition and into bed.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Public is the new private
A case of intimacy
The convenience and facility of digital photography has totally changed the photographer’s sense of commitment, and plagued the media of mere noise and marginalia profusely documented.
The trivia of everything is sucking the essence of life itself, in its most ineffable, ungraspable parts: those that can trigger the relevant questions and move us towards personal and creative expansion.
What made the fields, the rose and the fox special was not their nature of field, rose, and fox but the blossoming love of the Little Prince. It was (it is) a case of intimacy. Lawrence Durrell, in his Alexandria Quartet wrote that one can love a city only because a loved one lives in it. This is so true, and can be extrapolated to every place and moment in the world.
That’s how art acquires transcendence.
If you close your eyes, and look at this photograph, you’ll hear one of David Sylvian’s songs sweetly and sadly eroding my heart, soothing my mind from trouble, doubt and trouble and you’ll be able to touch the skin of the dawn or the sunset.
I will print it for you realize that all this too much, too fast, too many, too soon you are seeking for comfort is preventing you from noticing how close you are to the source of all wonder in its most pure form and simplicity.
My purpose is to make it tangible for you.
You’ll never imagine how committed I am to drag this beauty, all the beauty of the world to your door. Now.
It is baffling, overwhelming, almost impalpable, transient. And it’s yours to embrace. It’s my offering, my votive contribution, my alms fee, the ashes of time at the borders of what makes us one rather than us alone, or you, or me.
Snow and chocolate
After the battles in the winter front, his great grandmother took the clothes of fresh killed corpses to protect her left children from the south-west wind and keep them warm and free from pneumonia. Her husband didn’t come back from the ranks, and two of the kids had already died as a result of hunger and cold. She was determined to keep the rest alive, even if she had to walk between a field of cadavers, and dress the children with six sizes bigger blood stained clothes and leave those poor men naked under the snow fall, and see them turning blue, then completely white and dream of them every single night, and wake up as a dead asleep herself, to gather weeds to throw into the pot. One night she considered going further, and cutting off the flesh of a thigh, ready and willing to accept condemnation for such a profanity. In that moment, the missing husband appeared through the door, rawboned, gaunt, with his sad empty eyes telling horror stories, and that arrival kept her from more battleground incursions.
They cried in silence and only talked about the children’s decease.
Next morning, everyone had a breakfast of chocolate bars he had been saving in his backpack along six months of bare subsistence.
Decades later, in the family house there must be bread and chocolate and new clothes in the wardrobes, and it’s considered unkind and of bad taste to ask about war times.
All the children are happy and obsessively well fed.
Happy together
He is with her because she is the perfect bonus to the car. The ultimate tuning ornament.
She is with him because the car is the perfect complement to her sculpted body.
There’s no love in their agreement. No need of mutual affection or bounden duty.
He works in his car as an extension of himself, because he can’t repair or embellish a battered childhood.
She works in her body through expensive surgery and personal trainers to heal the lousy self concept of a sexually abused child.
None of them can articulate words to tell the story and break through the pains of memory, so they reinvent identity detail by detail, again and again, in cool and narcissistic company.
Therapy is too long and burdensome.
Bilateral symmetry
When sorting material I can notice a persistent pattern of polarities.
A photo is either accidental or incidental, Kairos (the perfect moment portrayed) or Kairos not (something is missing or absent, the sensation of incompleteness). Connected to the subject, eye-to-eye gazing, posing, spontaneous adjustment to the context or aware of a subject unaware of the camera. Witnessing a feeling, an emotional quality from a distance or being one with the feeling, as a symbolic reflection of what’s going in my life at the moment. Poignant or just ankle-deep. Intimate or anthropological. Testimonial or augury. Cast off of possessed. Ungraspable or bond. Carnal or sacred. Question or answer. Vague or categorical. Push or pull.
And beyond the tension between polarities, there is the silent dialogue, the closeness, the yearning that brings eye and the beauty of what is seen together as one. The whirlpool of mysterious attraction. The thrill of the ride, the pansexual flinch of unpronounced language. The rush to touch and embrace. Under full spectrum light, the appeal of darkness.
The digger
No matter how much moles think they understand the land they dig, the alluvium will never understand moles and most of the times, the tunnels are lost or clogged up . However, the mole will persist in its blind and stubborn plan to dig as far as possible, with tireless and unshakeable determination.
A mole’s tenacity is one of the most amazing qualities to adopt. It can literally make golf course caretakers go mad and force them to take extreme measures in order to exterminate them.
This quality is not based on belief, but on instinct.
When did us, humans, forget to get attuned to this drive, this incredible sense of what has to be done, here, now? No procrastination, no hesitation. Just digging.
Covenants for the New Order
If I had charted the map of life before my forty somethings I would have placed quiet waters and true love in the far side of virgin territories.
As she appeared, all the things that I had been bereaved of found name and definition, as well as a bunch of minor neurosis that serve the purpose of holding reality tight and manageable.
Photography is some kind of portable memory device, but also an organic extension of desire, endearment and anxiety.
In one scene of Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46, the character played by Samantha Morton opens a photo album, which holds the most precious moments of her life, the laughter of her lost parents, the enlightened eyes of the ones she gave smuggled ‘papers’ – sort of thumb sized chipsets granting freedom in a futuristic hyper-controlled world-, risking her own life. She says: Their faces are so beautiful, their eyes, their facial expressions’ and touches the album delighted in the warmly- embracing halo of past gone.
The album was not a video album, but an ordinary one, able to enhance the triggering of powerful emotional accounts. It was a tiny, thin album, compact and abridged. A summary of joy and feelings worthwhile remembering.
Sooner or later we will reach a tipping point, a harshly controlled global status. Emotions will be replaced with rules and the supreme act of rebellion will be to express love, intense convictions and feelings. We are doomed, we are playing with fire and numbing ourselves in order to avoid the responsibility that comes along with freedom. Huxley’s Brave New World, The Sphynx and Gattaca are not that implausible.
When those cold and unfeeling times arrive, my dynamic photo album will store a few photos of my daughters while they were discovering life, Delia’s feet dancing in quiet, peaceful waters and one of my young, bewildered and be-good-enough years. My girls’ photos to stay alive, my own portrait to remember I can survive.